Reliable datacenters and associated networks are useful to various applications, including the delivery of cloud services. However, mitigating a network failure can be a very challenging task, as the root cause of a given network failure is not always apparent to network engineers. Conventionally, network engineers may learn from experience or formal training how to deal with particular types of network failures. However, even formally-trained network engineers with years of experience may take a relatively long time (e.g., days) to diagnose and repair certain failures.
When working on a particular failure, network engineers may use support tickets to track steps taken to diagnose and mitigate problems. However, these tickets often include large amounts of relatively unstructured data including free form text, device logs, automated messages, email conversations, etc. Some tickets can grow very large, and may even have on the order of one million words. In view of these characteristics of support tickets, it can be very difficult for even skilled network engineers to discern, from support tickets, how to troubleshoot associated network failures.